As is typical of my scouting Big Bend, the sun had gone down and I had finally wrapped-up photographing Ernst Tinaja (see the first two images of this gallery). I was headed back to the main road, driving slowly along Old Ore Road. And that’s when I noticed the grave of Juan de Leon.
His marker, translated from Spanish, indicates: “Born June 24, 1906, in Boquillas, del Carmen, Coah. Died July 19, 1932.”
Not much to go on. Who was he?
According to info provided by the National Park, he was of no particular importance. He was shot and killed while riding his horse. His body was discovered several days afterward and was so decomposed from the July heat that he was buried where they found him.
There was no mention of the murder in local newspapers and a local suspect (one Oscar Loftin) was unscathed by two grand juries that failed to indict.
Speculations regarding the murder are numerous: Juan de Leon was part of a routine killing by Anglos; he was involved with local ranchers or their families; he was running border contraband, and; he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The National Park info indicates that by all accounts he was well-liked by Mexicans and Anglos.
Of course, his murder might suggest otherwise.
Whatever the case, I captured the above photo of his grave at 8:46 in the evening.
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 35.6 megabytes (MB).
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 8.82 MB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
• A number corresponds to the sequential order in a subject-matter-related sequence.
• The letter “B” indicates color correction to approximate what was visible when the image was captured.
• The letter “C” indicates enhancement beyond an approximation of what was visible at the time of capture.